Because the gliding search of our life
Is lacking in one quality, amusement,
We shall often return
To evenings, men, and walls of stone.
INSANITY
GEROID LATOUR was a lean, grandiose Frenchman whose curly beard resembled a cluster of ripe raspberries. His lips were maroon-colored and slightly distended, as though forever slyly inviting some stubbornly inarticulate thought—as though slyly inviting Geroid Latour. A man’s lips and beard are two-thirds of his being, unless he is an anchorite, and even in that case they can become impressively stunted. Geroid Latour was an angel rolling in red mud. From much rolling he had acquired the pert, raspberry beard, struggling lips, and the surreptitious grandeur of a nose, but the plastic grin of a singed angel sometimes listened to his face.
His wife, having futilely tried to wrench his beard off, sought to reach his eyes with a hat-pin.
“This is unnecessary,” he expostulated. “Another woman once did it much better with a word.”